SwabsMcGoo (Solo Lane): We started in the very first Open Division. We played through the first Open Division, we made it to the Crucible, and we lost. We kept the same roster for the next season but with one change, picking up Drated (now on Team Octalysis). We made it to the Crucible again, but we lost. After that, some people weren’t sure what they were going to do, possibly quit the game. But a few weeks later we received an email from Blizzard saying that LagF [formerly Team Naventic], the team we lost to in the Crucible, disbanded and their spot was open. We decided to stick together for another season.

After winning the Crucible in Phase 1, Drated and SpecialTea left the team, and we picked up Fury from GFE and Droplets from Open Division. Our coach, HeroPhysio, joined about a month before the second Crucible.

Fury (Tank): I used to have a 40-hour overnight work week at Wal-Mart way back in the Alpha and Beta stages of Heroes of the Storm. I realized that if I want to take the game seriously, even before HGC was announced, that I would need to take a risk and quit my job to focus on Heroes. No college or work right now; just full-on Heroes. I spend my off time with my girlfriend and her family.

Swabs: Last season I was a high school student, and when I got home [from school] we would start scrimming. I graduated, so I’m on summer break and have a lot of time right now. Going into next season, I plan on taking a few classes, but I’ll still have enough time to pursue Heroes full time and scrim the normal six hours each day.

Figgy (Flex): HGC season is pretty draining, so I’m doing it full time. I’ll go back to work if and when I stop being a professional player.

Droplets (Carry) I graduated from university last year. I started playing Heroes of the Storm again when I graduated and I was looking for a job. For me, if I want to do this, I want to do it all-in and try to make BlizzCon. So I’m doing this full time right now until I’m done.

Droplets I think overall we’re very community-based, so everyone has a say. Figgy is the main drafter and shotcaller while Fury is the secondary shotcaller.

Fury: Yeah, the way I shotcall is by initiating a fight or looking for a gank. Then I’m constantly looking for rotations on where their tank is, where I think the rest of the team is, if they’re doing a camp, or ganking [for] our solo laner.





Droplets: And Swabs and I will just call out things we see, trying to look for a play.

Swabs: Last season, our tank was Figgy, who is usually a ranged/flex player. He didn’t really like playing tank that much and was pretty new to the role. Fury is a lot more experienced. We find a lot more picks with him and he makes a lot more plays. I’m not flaming on Figgy, but Fury has been one of the best tanks in NA and Figgy was playing on a new role coming from Open Division.

Fury: No, flame him!

(Team laughs)

Figgy: Yeah, I was talking to Hero about this before the phase started. I was having trouble balancing the role and focusing on macro play. That was a really big struggle for me last season.

Fury: What I first noticed when I was doing my tryout, the first thing I noticed was that they were very young and hungry to improve, which they showed in the first phase towards the end. Whenever there are roster changes, you kind of take a few steps back and have to build synergy with your new teammates to get back to your peak. What I saw in this roster, and still see, is huge hunger and potential to compete against the top teams, especially the big titans like HeroesHearth and Tempo Storm. I think our series against HeroesHearth was actually closer than the numbers seemed (3-0). I feel like we had really good control in at least two of those games, but we were put in a situation where we had trouble closing out games against stronger teams.

I’ve never played with this roster in particular. I know every other player on the rosters. LFM is the only squad I’ve never had a chance to talk to. I’m glad I got to meet these guys by joining their team and I’m curious to see how much farther we can go in the next part.

Hana (Manager): Aware left to pursue a full-time job opportunity. He was a really great addition to the team—a wonderful person and very easy to get along with. He's been with LFM since the days of Imported Support, so certainly it's emotional losing a veteran player, but we're all really proud of him for his new position. He's such a smart guy and he's going to be doing amazing things and saving lives IRL! How kickbutt is that? Going from a HotS support to an IRL support! We said our goodbyes, and are now in the process of doing support tryouts.

Droplets: At the end of the weekend, we relax a little bit. Everybody goes over the VoDs of the games and we discuss them in our group chat. Generally, there are discussions on what we saw in the VoDs. Hero makes slides for us with teaching materials on how we could have done better or analyzing certain scenarios that we could have approached differently. We know what we did wrong, but Hero pushes us to think critically and consider what we could have done better. We then try to implement that throughout the week. Hero also gives us challenges or goals everyday to practice.

Fury: I think every team at this point should have a coach to help watch scrims and prepare for HGC matches. You have another person to watch from a bird’s eye view and keep tabs on the mistakes that players are making. I think some problems that some teams have, like the old Tempo Storm roster that I was on, is that not enough players respect the coach. That leads to a huge issue where the team is not benefiting from the coach. I like to ask the coach about my positioning as a tank and my engagements. I want to find out if what I did was wrong and what I should do better next time.

HeroPhysio: That’s a good question. My background is kinesiology: exercise, sports science, and physical therapy. I come from traditional sports, and a lot of my coaching is respect first. The guys are all mature and are here to practice and improve. For the most part, they know what they are doing and know what they do wrong immediately. So I’m not a disciplinarian or the iron hand that lays down the law or anything like that. A lot of it is just working with them to bring out their potential, which is what I do in my day job. So my philosophy on coaching is treating everybody the same, which is to treat everyone like an individual but as a part of a team. So I’ll work with the team as a whole or sometimes I’ll go one-on-one and work with some of the individuals on their own. For the most part it’s respect first. It’s definitely a two-way street. I show them respect and in return I expect it out of them. They put in the work and I put in the work.

In terms of preparing the team and helping them out in the HGC environment: knowing how much it means to them pushes me to do as much research as I can, as much analysis as I can. I want to see them succeed. I don’t just mean that within Heroes of the Storm, because with coaching what you are trying to do is help develop young men in all aspects of their life. Hopefully I get to see these guys develop into whatever success they find. Much like with TheAware, I’m really happy for him because he has found success in his real life and Heroes is a part of that.

Droplets: I think our team is pretty open-minded. So when we lose, we take it with a grain of salt. At the same time, we go back and evaluate what we could have done better. We know that we are a newer roster. So while we high expectations for ourselves, we know that it takes time and it's a process. We don’t get too upset when we lose. We just try to improve and go from there. Ultimately our goal is to make a LAN and if you’re always being salty and focusing on your mistakes then you can’t focus on what you can improve.

Fury For me personally, I’m very competitive when I focus on one thing, which is obviously Heroes. When we lose an important match, it kind of upsets me. I’m not mad at my teammates, but maybe I could have done something better or we could have practiced more. I always feel like I could have done more to help us win. I hate losing. I enjoy winning. It’s always fun to win—especially against rival teams. It’s kind of weird going to every event in 2017 to not going to any event [this year]. I’ve been on the top teams for quite a while and I want to get this squad to a LAN event. So if we lose an important match, I get upset because I know these guys are hungry. Once you go to your first LAN, you gain a fire and you want to make sure you attend the next one. I was so close on my last roster, GFE….actually, losing to LFM which is what caused us to miss the Western Clash in Phase 1 (team chuckles). It’s important to go to these LANs, because you learn so much. You can tell that HeroesHearth has grown a lot from their last two LANs.

Swabs: After a match that we lose, everyone is done for the day or the next day, but we all understand that we just have to move onto the next match and focus on getting as many wins as possible. We focus on what’s in front of us.

Hero: The team definitely has a growth-based mentality. I don’t know if that is because we came from Open Division and we know that we are at the bottom. In a way, we are “used” to losing, but all the mistakes we go through and all the misplays we go through, I think we approach it with the idea that “yes, we made a mistake at this time, but we aren’t going to make those moving forward.” So we can put those things behind us.

Figgy: In Open Division, as long as we were playing our best we could get the results we want. In pro league, every weekend you play a different opponent and they play different things. A lot of thought goes into preparing for that matchup each week.

Swabs: As the offlaner, the players are just better in the HGC. They’ll punish you for pushing out your wave. If you push it out, they’ll freeze it and deny experience. They’ll stay out of vision and rotate to kill your team. In Open Division, I’ll just see two players clearing the waves and then sit in the bush not doing anything.

Droplets: I used to play very aggressively in Open Division and I would generally get away with it. In pro league, I’ve come to understand more about timing and trading cooldowns. When you’re trying to look for a play or make a play, you’re not just blindly going in and using your cooldowns for free. You’ll get punished. In Open Division, I could go in on Genji and I wouldn’t get punished. In pro division, I would be instantly dead.

Figgy: Personally I like the third ban a lot. I feel like our players have deep hero pools in their positions. It's a lot easier to punish other players and their hero pools. I think it was obvious in the series against Simplicity and No Tomorrow where we banned out comfort heroes.

Figgy: Before the series, I wasn’t too sure. We used to scrim them at the start of the season, but we stopped because we felt like the comps unique to No Tomorrow weren’t very beneficial toward our practice goals. So we had agreed as a team to scrim with Open Division teams like Wrong Orc. So going through this weekend, we were basically looking at their series from the previous weekend. At the same time, I feel like everyone was pretty confident.

Afterwards, it was a bit complicated because going through series we knew that TheAware was going to leave for Part 2. I’ve been playing with TheAware for two years, so it was nice to end our last series on a win.

Fury: I would like us to make it to top six so that we can attempt the play-offs and try for a BlizzCon. We’ll soon see how NA will perform at the Western Clash, [and whether that will set up] up a third BlizzCon slot for NA. That would be really huge if HeroesHearth or Tempo Storm can step up at this Clash, especially since they don’t have to travel across the world and get jet lagged. It’s finally on North American soil.

Swabs: I just want to get to the playoffs. I definitely don’t want to be in the Crucible for the fourth time in a row. Maybe we can make a Cinderella run through the playoffs and get to BlizzCon, but I definitely want to give it a shot.

Fury: Every time NA gets to the roster swap period, the top teams just keep replacing players for the wrong reasons in my opinion. I think HeroesHearth has done a good job by sticking with the same roster and they are now the best team in North America. They didn’t drop a single series. If that doesn’t prove that sticking together will work out in the end, I don’t know what will.

Teams that do well but lose at LAN events sometimes tend to blame individuals and think they will do better if they change up the roster. The top EU teams have typically been consistent with their rosters, with the exception of the big Dignitas and Fnatic changes at the end of last year.

Figgy: I don’t know if this is an issue they can fix. HGC teams tend to only scrim HGC teams, and its hard for Open teams to get good practice. In terms of scheduling Open games, we used to play sometimes 1:00 to 3:00am on the east coast. I don’t know if that’s still a problem, but it was an issue when we played.

Swabs: I think there should bigger incentive for staying together as a team from week one. In the Open Division second phase, we didn’t even play in the first three cups because we knew we would make it to the playoffs and we knew we could easily make top eight. Being the number one seed doesn’t mean anything really, so I think that number one seed should get an automatic qualification for Crucible and maybe get more points so that you can’t just make a team at the end of the season and make the playoffs.

Droplets: I think they need to promote stability in rosters. In Open Division, a lot of teams will disband if they lose a cup. Essentially the teams are always recycling the same players without resolving issues, which holds the Open Division back. It doesn’t matter if players continue swapping teams as long as they can make Cup 8.

Fury: I agree with Swabs, they need to make getting first seed more valuable. Getting an auto-qualification to the Crucible is probably the perfect thing. I don’t know how much Blizzard can invest in both Open Division and HGC, but I feel like adding a little more money may help players stick around as they try to get into HGC. You can’t live off of anything from Open Division, and you can’t live off it until you push through to HGC. So I think they just need to up the prizes for HGC and Open Division to keep people interested.

Droplets: I actually think they should take away the prize pool and create a LAN for the Crucible. The prize pool is so little that its very low incentive. That money should go towards creating an experience similar to pro play.

Fury: They should definitely have the Crucible as a LAN event, because it is so important. Not having ping issues will help determine who is the better team.

Hero: We love our fans. That’s why we play. Also, I encourage the guys to make sure that they take regular breaks for themselves. I make sure they stretch and stay healthy. In our first phase, I did a stream where I went through stretches with the guys. I think we just encourage balance so that we’re always prepared mentally to bring it!

Fury: Shoutout to all of my loyal fans, old and new from the good old alpha days as Curse Gaming through now. Huge shoutout to my current roster and coach, the manager and owner. And a shoutout to my girlfriend and her family for the amount of support they give me as I journey through Heroes of the Storm. Also, Fury stream coming soon!

Figgy: Shoutout to TheAware.

Droplets: Shoutout to Swabs’s sister who recently got married.

Swabs: Shoutout to my family—my brother, sister, mom, and dad—who all watch my games and support me.